Rumsfeld targets waste at Pentagon

September 11, 2001|By Paul Richter, Special to the Tribune. Paul Richter is a staff writer for the Los Angeles Times, a Tribune newspaper. Tribune news services contributed to this report.

WASHINGTON — With its maddening organizational charts and overpriced commodes, the Pentagon always has been the ultimate target for the efficiency-minded in Washington.

Skilled managers from former Defense Secretaries Robert S. McNamara to Caspar Weinberger have mobilized campaigns that promised savings of billions but usually fell far short of their goals.

Nevertheless, on Monday an undeterred Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said he planned to renew the crusade, and described the effort to wring savings from the $300 billion-plus Defense Department budget as the moral equivalent of war.

"It could be said that it's a matter of life and death--every American's," Rumsfeld said at the Pentagon. "Today we declare war on bureaucracy; not people, but processes."

Rumsfeld said he planned to root out duplicative organization, cut a civilian workforce of roughly 600,000 and, following a requirement of federal law, trim headquarters staffs by 15 percent this year.

Veterans of past Pentagon reform efforts hailed Rumsfeld's goal. But they also predicted the new secretary would have as much trouble as his predecessors. They warned against expecting savings significant enough to move the department toward its goal of replacing aging weaponry.

"Their intentions are great, but the likelihood that they'll make a dent in the system is almost nil," said Daniel Goure, an analyst with the Lexington Institute, a conservative think tank in Virginia, and an official in the administration of the first President George Bush.

Rumsfeld declined to say how many cuts he expected in the civilian workforce, which already has shrunk from about 1.1million in 1990 as part of post-Cold War reductions. But he said he had "never seen an organization" that could not could cut its expenses by at least 5 percent. At the Pentagon, that would save $15 billion to $18 billion a year, he said.

He pointed out what he said were some examples of inefficiencies at the department. He noted that the Army, Navy and Air Force each have a separate general counsel's office, and the defense secretary's bureaucracy has one as well; that three separate commissary and exchange systems purchase supplies for the services; and that in the Navy, "One out of every five officers is a physician."

He noted that the civilian service secretaries and uniformed chiefs of staff have separate support staffs, and that the services have separate public-relations and lobbying organizations.

"Maybe we need many of them," said Rumsfeld, who returned to the Pentagon in January after 25 years as a successful business executive. "But I have a feeling we need fewer than we have."

Rumsfeld argued that private industry could not conduct business the way the government does and survive. The Pentagon must reform its financial information and computer information systems and close unneeded military bases, he said, to become more efficient.

Experts said major cost savings are difficult to achieve at the Pentagon, in part because the organization must carry out complex and sometimes contradictory congressional requirements.

Comparing the Defense Department to a corporation is misleading, said Thomas Donnelly, a former Republican congressional aide who is with the Project for a New American Century, a conservative think tank.

"We're a democracy, and we do things by consensus" and thus, he said, not always in the most efficient manner.

Some analysts contended that the new campaign has a political goal as well as a financial one.

With the department asking for an 11 percent budget increase during a slowing economy, Rumsfeld "has got to show that he's trying to be as efficient as he can," Goure said.

Rumsfeld said his effort would not be accomplished in the short term, or perhaps even during a potential eight-year span. Achieving change inside the Pentagon may be "like turning a battleship," he said, but even "a little bit of change goes a very long way."